JONÁŠ HÁJEK has published three poetry collections: Suť (Debris – Fra 2007), Vlastivěda (Social Studies – Fra 2010), Básně 3 (Poems 3 – Triáda 2013). For his first collection, he was awarded the Jiří Orten Prize and nominated for the Magnesia Litera Award in category of Discovery of the Year. He is a contributor to the magazines Souvislosti and Host. In addition to being a poet, he is also a translator of German literature (Günter Eich, Mascha Kaléko). He lives in Prague and works as an editor for a music publisher.

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About the Translator:

DEBORAH GARFINKLE is a writer, translator and literary critic living in San Francisco. Her work has appeared in newspapers, magazines anthologies and literary journals in the US and abroad. The Old Man’s Verses, her first full-length translation of selected works by Czech poet Ivan Diviš, was nominated for a Northern California Book Award. Ms. Garfinkle earned both an NEA Translation Fellowship and a PEN Translation Grant for her most recent translation, Worm-Eaten Time: Poems from a Life under Normalization, poems by Pavel Šrut, which was published in 2016.

I’m not convinced of anything. I don’t trust my memory, which tells me that the entire village gathered in front of the house that night. They had come to do something bad. I can still see the whole thing. A tribal ritual.